Not everyone appreciates the artistry of Jackson Pollock’s famous drip paintings, with some dismissing them as something any child could create. While Pollock’s work is undeniably more sophisticated than that, it turns out that when one looks at splatter paintings made by adults and young children through a fractal lens and compares them to those of Pollock himself, the children’s work does bear a closer resemblance to Pollock’s than those of the adults. This might be due to the artist’s physiology, namely a certain clumsiness with regard to balance, according to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Physics.
Co-author Richard Taylor, a physicist at the University of Oregon, first found evidence of fractal patterns in Pollock’s seemingly random drip patterns in 2001. As previously reported, his original hypothesis drew considerable controversy, both from art historians and a few fellow physicists. In a 2006 paper published in Nature, Case University physicists Katherine Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur claimed Taylor’s work was “seriously flawed” and “lacked the range of scales needed to be considered fractal.” (To prove the point, Jones-Smith created her own version of a fractal painting using Taylor’s criteria in about five minutes with Photoshop.)
Taylor was particularly criticized for his attempt to use fractal analysis as the basis for an authentication tool to distinguish genuine Pollocks from reproductions or forgeries. He concedes that much of that criticism was valid at the time. But as vindication, he points to a machine learning-based study in 2015 relying on fractal dimension and other factors that achieved a 93 percent accuracy rate distinguishing between genuine Pollocks and non-Pollocks. Taylor built on that work for a 2024 paper reporting 99 percent accuracy.
Nor is Taylor the first to find hidden physics in Pollock’s masterpieces. In 2011, an interdisciplinary article in Physics Today examined Pollock’s use of a “coiling instability” in his paintings. This is basically a mathematical description for how a viscous fluid folds onto itself like a coiling rope—just like pouring cold maple syrup on pancakes. The patterns that form depend on how thick the fluid is (its viscosity) and how fast it’s moving. Thick fluids form straight lines when being spread rapidly across a canvas but will form loops and squiggles and figure eights if poured slowly.
That insight, too, was not without controversy. Later work in 2019 questioned whether the artist deliberately exploited coiling instabilities in his work, concluding that the opposite was true: Pollock deliberately avoided so-called “coiling instabilities” as he worked. Still, Pollock almost certainly relied heavily on physics as he painted, whether he did so deliberately or not. He liked to play with texture and viscosity when mixing his paints, often adding solvents to make them thicker or thinner. There’s even 1950 video footage of Pollock at work, in which he asserts, “I can control the flow of paint. There is no accident.”
When clumsiness is an asset
Pollock’s dripping technique involved laying a canvas flat on the floor and then pouring paint on top of it. Sometimes he poured it directly from a can, sometimes he used a stick, knife, or brush, and sometimes he used a syringe. The artist usually “rhythmically” moved around the canvas as he worked. “Popular books in particular talk about Pollock as being like a graceful ballet dancer who would dance above the canvas magically,” Taylor told Ars. But over the last 25 years, Taylor became friends with noted Pollock scholar Francis O’Connor, who told him this was not the case. In reality, “Pollock was notoriously clumsy,” said Taylor.
This intrigued Taylor, since it reminded him of other famous artists whose physical limitations informed their work, such as Claude Monet’s cataracts, Vincent van Gogh’s psychological struggles, and Willem de Kooning’s Alzheimer’s disease. “I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that great art can come out of something that, on a day-to-day basis, would be a limit,” he said. He wondered if Pollock’s poor balance might be key to the artist’s process. “When you look at photographs of Pollock, he leant over more than he had to,” said Taylor. “So he clearly wasn’t a victim of his physiology, he was triggering it to produce this fractal fluency effect. There’s no way he understood it, but he understood the magic when he wandered into that sweet spot.”
Taylor thought there might be a way to put this new hypothesis to the test, particularly in light of numerous experimental studies showing the prevalence of fractals in human physiology: walking, dancing, martial arts, and balancing motion, such as postural sway while standing. “Let’s think about that balance mechanism,” he said. “You go off-balance, you’re swaying around, so you’ve got big sways mixed in with smaller and smaller and smaller sways. It’s a multi-scale thing.”
Drip, drip, drip
Serendipitously, Taylor even had a built-in laboratory environment in which to conduct such experiments: the public “Dripfests” he regularly organized, in which both adults and children had the opportunity to create their own Pollock-like artworks by splattering diluted paint on sheets of paper on the floor. Life changes interfered before Taylor could implement the experiment, and the concept got pushed to the back burner. But he revived it a few years ago.
The study subjects were 18 children between the ages of four and six, and 34 adults ages 18 to 25. The age discrepancy was crucial, since those two groups are at markedly different stages of biomechanical balance development. And this time around, Taylor and his co-authors didn’t just look at the fractal dimensions of the resulting paintings, i.e., measuring the self-similar scaling behavior of the splatter patterns. They also looked at something called “lacunarity,” examining the variations in the gaps between paint clusters.
The results: Splatter paintings by adults had higher paint densities and wider, more varied paint trajectories. The children’s paintings had smaller fine-scale patterns, more gaps between paint clusters, and simpler one-dimensional trajectories that didn’t change direction nearly as often. “They both have coarse-scale motions, but the adults have lots of fine-scale structure,” said Taylor. “Not only did the kids have less fine structure, the fine structure they did have was very clumpy, while the adults’ fine structure was very uniform. So when the person is moving and how they regain their balance, we think it’s to do with how much structure there is at these different scales and how uniform it is.”
Taylor et al. also applied the same analysis to Pollock’s Number 14 and Max Ernst’s Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly to lay the groundwork for future research on variations in fractal dimensions and lacunarity across artists. Ernst used a controlled pendulum for his paintings, attaching paint cans to a string, a stark contrast to Pollock’s free movement technique. Ernst’s painting had fractal dimensions within the range of the children’s distribution, which makes sense to Taylor. “It’s stripping away the natural rhythms, and that’s what we found as well,” he said.
While this study compared young children and adults precisely because of the differences in balance physiology, Taylor et al. acknowledge they did not directly measure the subjects’ biomechanical balance while they were painting. So future Dripfests will have subjects wearing motion sensors as they paint to enable direct comparison of those motions and the resulting poured patterns of the paintings. Taylor also plans to expand his lacunarity analysis to more works by Pollock and other artists using drip or pouring techniques.
Frontiers in Physics, 2025. DOI: 10.3389/fphy.2025.1673780 (About DOIs).
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